Observations and Questions for EPRDF

By Professor Teodros Kiros
Tigrai Online, August 27, 2015

Professor Teodros Kiros admires achievements of EPRDF and asks tough questions the Ethiopian government

In two highly read recent articles on the achievements of EPRDF, I used philosophical judiciousness and took a hard look at Ethiopian reality for the past thirty four years and admired the regime’s achievements in putting Ethiopia on the right developmental trajectory and hailed the leaders for building schools and universities, opening the health regime to all Ethiopians, continuing to build new infrastructure and impressive dams, and much more is on the way.

By normal standards these are achievements, which ought to be recognized and hailed.  I am hailing them again.

Once again, at the expense of alienating the opposition, I am in the mood of celebrating the developmental hopes for a new Ethiopia, for years to come.

I have a serious of questions, however, which I would like to address to the leaders.  They are the following.

 

1. Note that the opposition is also composed of patriotic Ethiopians who love their country are ready to die for it.  How is your regime going to engage the opposition in a peaceful and radically democratic style and invite to return home and shape the bright future of Ethiopia?


2. Ethiopian investors who want to participate in the developmental project are being rejected left and right, unless they are card holding party members.  When and how is this corrupt practice going to be corrected?


3. What is preventing the party from inviting its highly educated Ethiopians in the diaspora to return home and work peacefully and productively according to the expertise, which they can bring to their country, instead of aging and leaving unfulfilled lives in foreign lands?  When is this going to be changed, since this is time sensitive and would have to be acted on before these national treasures and professionals die with broken hearts?


4. How are you going to equalize the lives of those Ethiopians who work, when they are employed, from dusk to dawn, for meager wages, and still block those who manage to save and build homes for their families by erecting bureaucratic walls which they cannot penetrate, and when they fail, they leave their beloved Ethiopia and die in foreign lands?